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of services in ACT Health. That study was endorsed by both the then Labor Government and the then Liberal Opposition as the basis for forward planning in health. Indeed, it is ironic that, despite much of the rhetoric, and particularly the rhetoric in Booz Allen, the health budget as it has been tabled today seems to follow the plan set out in that Andersen consultancy.

We are very concerned that $330,000 of public funds has already been expended on what appears to us to be a very poor product. The Booz Allen report has been condemned nearly universally from the trade union movement but also from senior doctors with no real history of getting involved in the politics of health in the ACT. What is of greatest concern to the Opposition about this report is the apparently very shallow and facile approach it takes to health. For $330,000, we have a document that tells us that we spend some $30m more than standardised expenditure on health. For that finding they source Peat Marwick's comparative data, which is already a public document, and the Andersen report - last year's work. Mrs Carnell in defending this report has been saying long and loudly, “But it only tells us what we already knew”. Exactly, Mrs Carnell.

Mrs Carnell: It tells us how to do it.

MR CONNOLLY: I will come to that. If you think this tells you how to do it, I pity the health system. For $330,000 we have been told what we already know, as Mrs Carnell acknowledges again today, and we have got a crude hit list of jobs to go in the health system. That is of great concern to the Opposition and members of the public on the basis that some of its targeting of areas will cause real chaos in our system. There is much rhetoric that we are really targeting clerical and administrative areas. That has been largely done in recent years, and the study that was published last year by Access Economics, of all people, in the Advance Bank magazine shows that over the period 1990 to 1994 there were some very dramatic reductions in staffing levels in health, particularly in the clerical and administrative areas.

I had some hope, having heard the budget speech, that much of the rhetoric of Booz Allen was being abandoned by the Government and that we might get a statement that they would not go ahead and throw good money after bad on the next $700,000 phase of the consultancy, but I fear that I have been disabused of that by the fact that even now documents from management are circulating around Woden Valley Hospital clearly indicating that these staffing targets are very realistic. In the staff bulletin, the operational efficiency review put out by the department in September - that is, within very recent days - shows that the proposals for bottom line reductions in staff of between 72 and 85 on ward nursing and between 3.8 and 11 in emergency remain on the table as real proposals for very substantial job losses. That is a crude and simplistic approach to achieving savings targets. If the Government believes that it has got value for $330,000 in producing a simplistic hit list of jobs to go, then this Government seems to have a very lackadaisical approach to the engagement of consultants.

That is a matter that raises a broad issue of concern to the Opposition, that is, how do we monitor whether we get value for money for consultants? The use of consultants has been a fairly standard process for governments, Labor and Liberal, in recent years in all parts of Australia, but it seems to be growing apace in the ACT. In this exercise we are locked in, it seems, although I hope to hear that we are not, for $1m to the firm of

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